Topic: Ideas / Possible SOLUTION to NEVER-ENDING BLOCKCHAIN.. - page 2. (Read 5959 times)

You should develop that idea to make a more exact technical proposal. (The idea seems possible and reasonable technically, I mean.)
There are a number of solutions for the ever-growing blockchain problem, I think it is also a little alarming, how many people seem to think that it's not a problem, that it will grow forever and everyone will be happy.
A hard fork is of course inevitable for this, but this only means that the solution can perhaps be as good as it needs, since the fork will be done anyway.
But we need more exact solutions, not "basic thougths" about this, since there are a lot of them floating around.

"..merge their Coins.."

They won't have a choice.. The miners do it. And get paid, so that is the incentive..

Enemies of Bitcoin won't merge their coins, they'll do exactly opposite thing, so we must be able to handle the worst case scenario.

Hello,

I wanted to mention an idea for fixing the Never Ending Blockchain conundrum that hangs over us all. Simply assuming we'll be able to handle a 50 quintillion TB file, doesn't fill me, as a developer, with confidence..

I understand the protocol, I think, and so I came up with this.

Satoshi Dice is NOT A PROBLEM. He generates a lot of transactions, and miners get paid for processing tx's. That's what they do.! The fact that there is all this dust etc, is quite frankly irrelevant. The protocol allows it, so it's good.

The PROBLEM - as I see it - is that if we want to keep a record of every transaction ever, this is a BIG task. What if we changed the perpective and kept the ONLY really important piece of information.. How much each account has in unspent output txs.. ?

What I mean is this.

The Blockchain is made up of blocks, mined by the miners. I say, that the only useful blocks, are ones with UNSPENT TX outputs. If a block is only full of SPENT tx outputs, other than for the sake of posterity, and as a checking reference, that block is not really essential.

So - What if a miner could perform a special transaction, that spends UNSPENT tx outputs from earlier blocks, all from the same account, scoops them ALL UP, to say 1000 blocks behind the current block, and outputs 1 UNSPENT tx output in the latest block, for the SAME USER.?

This would sweep up all the Satoshi Dust, and all the unused spends and make, one useable SPENDABLE output tx for the same account.

You would simply remove the earlier blocks from the blockchain as they were cleared of spendable outputs..

Actually, maybe a special block that simple stores a list of [ account, IN amount, OUT amount, ] so that for reference we know the basic info, could be used to replace the much larger block which holds ALL the info.. hmm..

The blockchain would then still have the correct amount of fixed coins in it, but it would be a 'ROLLING-CHAIN' that would sacrifice it's history, but maintain balances accurately. Can a blockchain with only 1000 blocks still be verifiable ? It woud be just as hard to hack it, no?

This would make its size orders of magnitude smaller.. actually manageable by todays hardware..

The Miners would love it because they benefit from a smaller blockchain, AND they could get paid for processing that SCOOP-UP transaction.

You could say that ONLY blocks 1000 deep or more can be mined for UNSPENT txs..

This would also, rightly I think, bring in a very small, 1 Tx fee every so on, say 6 months, to keep your balance in the blockchain. As it gets shuffled up to a newer block.

I don't know if this is easily possible, but I know that nothing is impossible..

This idea may be full of holes, but may spur some lateral thinking.

Thoughts !?